Emanuele Rocca: A (very) brief history of Australia
This post is mostly a sum-up of the Wikipedia page History of Australia,
with some content taken from History of the British Empire. Both texts are
available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
I do not seem to be able to learn about a new topic without taking notes: in
this case I have decided to publish my work, hoping that someone will find it
useful. Some very important themes such as the Gold Rush and Australian History
during the World Wars have been impudently ignored.
Indigenous Australians
The ancestors of Indigenous Australians are believed to have arrived in
Australia 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 70,000 years
ago.
By 1788, the population of Australia existed as 250 individual nations, many
of which were in alliance with one another, and within each nation there
existed several clans, from as few as five or six to as many as 30 or 40.
Each nation had its own language and a few had multiple, thus over 250
languages existed, around 200 of which are now extinct.
Permanent European settlers arrived at Sydney in 1788 and came to control most
of the continent by end of the 19th century. Bastions of largely unaltered
Aboriginal societies survived, particularly in Northern and Western Australia
into the 20th century, until finally, a group of Pintupi people of the Gibson
Desert became the last people to be contacted by outsider ways in 1984.
European explorers
Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) is one of the names given to a
hypothetical continent which appeared on European maps between the 15th and
18th centuries. Although the landmass was drawn onto maps, Terra Australis was
not based on any actual surveying of such a landmass but rather based on the
hypothesis that continents in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by
land in the south.
The first documented European landing in Australia was made in 1606 by a Dutch
ship led by Willem Janszoon. Hence the ancient name "Nova Hollandia". The
same year, a Spanish expedition had landed in the New Hebrides and, believing
them to be the fabled southern continent, named the land: "Terra Austral del
Espiritu Santo". Hence the current name "Australia".
Although various proposals for colonisation were made, notably by Pierre Purry
from 1717 to 1744, none was officially attempted. Indigenous Australians were
less able to trade with Europeans than were the peoples of India, the East
Indies, China, and Japan. The Dutch East India Company concluded that there
was "no good to be done there".
In 1769, Lieutenant James Cook tried to locate the supposed Southern
Continent. This continent was not found, and Cook decided to survey the east
coast of New Holland, the only major part of that continent that had not been
charted by Dutch navigators.
Cook charted and took possession of the east coast of New Holland. He noted the
following in his journal:
"I can land no more upon this Eastern coast of New Holland, and on the Western side I can make no new discovery the honour of which belongs to the Dutch Navigators and as such they may lay Claim to it as their property, but the Eastern Coast from the Latitude of 38 South down to this place I am confident was never seen or viseted by any European before us and therefore by the same Rule belongs to great Brittan."
Colonisation
The American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) saw Great Britain lose most of its
North American colonies and consider establishing replacement territories.
The British colony of New South Wales was established with the arrival of the
First Fleet of 11 vessels in January 1788. It consisted of over a thousand
settlers, including 778 convicts (192 women and 586 men). A few days after
arrival at Botany Bay the fleet moved to the more suitable Port Jackson where
a settlement was established at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. This date
later became Australia's national day, Australia Day.
Between 1788 and 1868, approximately 161,700 convicts (of whom 25,000 were
women) were transported to the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Van
Diemen's land and Western Australia. Early colonial administrations were
anxious to address the gender imbalance in the population brought about by the
importation of large numbers of convict men.
In 1835, the British Colonial Office issued the Proclamation of Governor
Bourke, implementing the legal doctrine of terra nullius upon which British
settlement was based, reinforcing the notion that the land belonged to no one
prior to the British Crown taking possession of it and quashing any likelihood
of treaties with Aboriginal peoples, including that signed by John Batman. Its
publication meant that from then, all people found occupying land without the
authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers.
A group in Britain led by Edward Gibbon Wakefield sought to start a colony
based on free settlement and political and religious freedoms, rather than
convict labour. The South Australia Act [1834], passed by the British
Government which established the colony reflected these desires and included a
promise of representative government when the population reached 50,000
people. Significantly, the Letters Patent enabling the South Australia Act
1834 included a guarantee of the rights of 'any Aboriginal Natives' and their
descendants to lands they 'now actually occupied or enjoyed'.
In 1836, two ships of the South Australia Land Company left to establish the
first settlement on Kangaroo Island. The foundation of South Australia is now
generally commemorated as Governor John Hindmarsh's Proclamation of the new
Province at Glenelg, on the mainland, on 28 December 1836. By 1851 the colony
was experimenting with a partially elected council.
Development of Australian democracy
Traditional Aboriginal society had been governed by councils of elders and a
corporate decision making process, but the first European-style governments
established after 1788 were autocratic and run by appointed governors.
The reformist attorney general, John Plunkett, sought to apply Enlightenment
principles to governance in the colony, pursuing the establishment of equality
before the law.
Plunkett twice charged the colonist perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre
of Aborigines with murder, resulting in a conviction and his landmark Church
Act of 1836 disestablished the Church of England and established legal
equality between Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and later Methodists.
In 1840, the Adelaide City Council and the Sydney City Council were
established. Men who possessed 1,000 pounds worth of property were able to
stand for election and wealthy landowners were permitted up to four votes each
in elections. Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the
New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, again with voting rights (for
males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity. Voter rights
were extended further in New South Wales in 1850 and elections for legislative
councils were held in the colonies of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
Women became eligible to vote for the Parliament of South Australia in 1895.
This was the first legislation in the world permitting women also to stand for
election to political office and, in 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the
first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing
for election as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation.
Western Australia granted voting rights to women in 1899. Early federal
parliamentary reform and judicial interpretation sought to limit Aboriginal
voting in practice, a situation which endured until rights activists began
campaigning in the 1940s.
Road to independence
Despite suspicion from some sections of the colonial community (especially in
smaller colonies) about the value of nationhood, improvements in
inter-colonial transport and communication, including the linking of Perth to
the south eastern cities by telegraph in 1877, helped break down
inter-colonial rivalries.
New South Wales Premier Henry Parkes addressed a rural audience in his 1889
Tenterfield Oration, stating that the time had come to form a national
executive government:
"Australia [now has] a population of three and a half millions, and the American people numbered only between three and four millions when they formed the great commonwealth of the United States. The numbers were about the same, and surely what the Americans had done by war, the Australians could bring about in peace, without breaking the ties that held them to the mother country."Though Parkes would not live to see it, his vision would be achieved within a little over a decade, and he is remembered as the "father of federation". The Commonwealth of Australia came into being when the Federal Constitution was proclaimed by the Governor-General, Lord Hopetoun, on 1 January 1901. Australia took part in WWI. The contributions of Australian and New Zealand troops during the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire had a great impact on the national consciousness at home, and marked a watershed in the transition of Australia and New Zealand from colonies to nations in their own right. The countries continue to commemorate this occasion on ANZAC Day. Australia achieved independent Sovereign Nation status after World War I, under the Statute of Westminster, which defined Dominions of the British empire in the following way:
"They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations."The parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland (currently part of Canada) were now independent of British legislative control, they could nullify British laws and Britain could no longer pass laws for them without their consent. The Australia Act 1986 removed any remaining links between the British Parliament and the Australian states.
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